It said: "Our hope is to create a modern version of this successful model, offering homeless individuals an opportunity to sell a digital service instead of a material commodity.

"SxSW Interactive attendees can pay what they like to access 4G networks carried by our homeless collaborators. This service is intended to deliver on the demand for better transit connectivity during the conference."

The project features profiles of some of its participants.

One, known as Clarence, has a bio which reads: "Clarence is from New Orleans, LA. He prefers the term "houseless" to "homeless". He originally lost his house in Katrina and has had financial trouble since. He considers himself a good guy and tries to be a good friend to people."

"Somehow, our intent has been lost in here," Radia told RRW. "What we're trying to do is say the street newspaper model works. It's the output of it that. ... we fear for its future, and there's no one working on solving this problem."

The creators of the project also denied that safety was an issue, given the small scale of the project and the presence of large numbers of people in Austin during the conference.

They added that they had spoken to several homeless charities, and that their response was "overwhelmingly positive".

Saneel Radia at BBH wrote: "We'd like to not only donate, but to try to help them solve problems over the long term. We may not always be right, but that's never kept us from trying."

BBH later updated their blog post to address some of the criticism:

"We are not selling anything. There is no brand involved. There is no commercial benefit whatsoever," they said.

Insisting the "test program" was scheduled to end on Monday anyway, they also said each of the hotspot managers kept all of the money they earned.

"We’d really like to see iterations of the program in which this media channel of hotspots is owned by the homeless organidations and used as a platform for them to create content," they said.